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Grum Botnet Taken Down

The Grum botnet was reported to produce 20% of spam e-mail in the world. The botnet has now been shutdown after authorities in the Netherlands, Russia, and Panama disabled the command and control servers that give direction to infected machines. Senior staff scientist at FireEye Atif Mushtaq has reported that "We've seen the number of infected machines sending emails drop from 120,000 to 20,000 to zero. In addition, reports from SpamHaus and Trustwave indicate that the Lethic botnet has gone underground. Overall, we're seeing a global reduction in spam of about 50 percent—the lowest levels ever." Researchers are confident that the infected machines won't be able to get back in contact with new servers as the Grum software didn't have any sort of adaptive mechanisms.